I’ve been seeing this argument come up more and more. People look at the class statistics of deathlog and see that over 4% of warriors are making it to 60, while every other class else sits below 2%. It’s easy to see how they can begin to think it’s ridiculous that everyone started out saying that warrior was the hardest class.
As with most things, the truth is nuanced. On unofficial hardcore, back when everyone used the addon, you weren’t allowed to trade, do dungeons more than once, use the auction house, or store money on bank alts to later use to feed your new alts. This meant that warriors were severely under-geared. Warriors, for those who don’t know, are one of the most gear-dependent classes. The damage that spells do for spell casters, for instance, is fixed, but the damage warrior abilities do is directly tied to their weapon damage. So when you hear that warriors are the hardest class to play, this really is a relic from the unofficial hardcore days. It does not apply to official hardcore. You have not been fed a lie and no, you should not develop a false sense of superiority thinking that everyone else is struggling with their warrior, while it’s a walk in the park for you. It’s much easier for everyone on their warrior on official hardcore now.
Furthermore, the numbers don’t lie. Old data for deathlog has the success for warriors to hit 60 sitting at less than 1%. Now however, warriors are above 4%. No other class has gone through such a drastic change in survivability from unofficial to official.
“So, SSF warriors are harder, official wow is easier. Doesn’t that apply to every class though?”
Of course it does, but the major point here is that gear affects warriors far more than any other class.
I think that playing SSF is hugely beneficial for understanding many aspects about the game and I wish more people had have done this. I think even now, it’s a good idea to try this out. People are getting the wrong idea about many things these days with the guardrails of the auction house and bank alts being a thing now. We have gotten to the point where new people don’t even know about the wetlands run or at what level you can complete it. They just expect a summon every time.
It’s a function of time as well. Warrior success rate at launch was likely lower than it is now simply because of the ability to afford those boe blue weapons. At 5-10g each they are cheap if you have a bank alt, but you cant afford that when leveling for the first time.
You can then buy the mats for ww axe at 30 and have a high level friend kill cyclonian for you. As a result, you will smash your way through the 30s without ever worrying.
That being said, the difficulty of warrior isn’t when things are going well. It’s when things go wrong that punish warriors harder than others. They dont have the same tools available to escape bad situations.
It’s actually impossible to do it at level 1 due to the fact that you will level up from exploration experience and be level 2 by the time you get there. I tried.
The fact that we have access to AH and trading in official HC doesn’t change that they’ve always been considered a bad leveling class, specifically in the early levels when people are prone to dying before they get a fully fleshed out toolkit.
Being able to AH and trade in official HC certainly puts them in a more manageable class to level, but they are still easily one of the weaker classes to pick from and thus the most susceptible to dying when put in a pickle.
As for why warriors have a higher % getting to 60 it’s because they’re so in demand and thus played at a higher level than others. Everyone wants to play the class that is the de facto tanking class and also very strong DPS when geared.
1.) When you’re ungeared on a fresh server warriors are quite slow and risky to level. When you’re twinked with AH gear on a second character they are very fast and easy to level. This is probably why the survival rate has been drifting up over time. They were in the bottom 3 of survival at release (along with warlock and shaman), and now they have one of the highest survival rates.
2.) Warriors are enriched for people who min/max dps and people who want to play tanks. Both of these groups are generally more skilled players. Contrast this with hunter which everyone knows is enriched for dumb players (hunter is weird in that it has a very high skill cap but a very low skill floor, so it attracts both extremes).
But warriors are absolutely a bad soloing class compared to nearly every other. Maybe only shaman is worse (shaman routinely has the lowest survival rate to 60, because it doesn’t scale as well with gear, has bad mana efficiency, and totems ninja pull and get players killed)
Yeah, I’d seen that one. It’s actually a lot riskier than the hop near Gnomer. But you have to fall carefully and have a bit of luck. I give it about 3/10 chance of success.
Kinda surprised by these stats myself. Even with great gear, there are times when you’d find yourself in situations as a warrior where you’d just die and nothing would have helped. Caves are a nightmare for any class, but for a warrior soloing… it’s damn near a suicide; even with proper gear.
I do agree though that the hardcore mod was significantly tougher for warriors and all other classes. A lot of those rules were rather arbitrary and just seemed to span from one person’s opinion of what should constitute hardcore; and they were trying to go for SSF it seemed. Glad to see a lot of it didn’t make a transition into official.
